Before I get started on TAR, I feel I should talk briefly about the week in television that I forgot to write up on, despite the Olympics making the television landscape a barren wasteland filled with re-runs. The only things of note were a ho-hum episode of Damages (S03E05: It’s Not My Birthday), which didn’t reveal much and would have been graded a B, and a crappy BBC Four docudrama about the expenses report, On Expenses, centering on US ex-pat Heather Brooke’s quest to expose MPs’ expenses and Michael Martin’s attempt to stop her A truly awful script meant that even Brain Cox and Anna Maxwell Martin couldn’t salvage the dreck that was placed in front of them (although their performances left a lot to be desired, which seems strange in hind sight). Despite a disclaimer at the beginning saying that whilst they’d changed stuff, “you couldn’t make this stuff up”, the desire to ram the events into a Syd Field three-act structure meant that the whole journey became convoluted and boring. The best bits were when the script actually allowed the hysteria of the situation speak out for itself in the tribunal. Sadly, this was an oasis in a murky sea of “character development” and other pointless TV conventions. Had it been graded, it would have received a C.